In an interview to The Guardian as part of the Pegasus Project, WhatsApp CEO Will Cathcart has revealed that government officials around the world were also part of 1,400 WhatsApp users who were attacked through the NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware in 2019.
Notably, Cathcart also observed that he saw a similarity between the attack against WhatsApp users in 2019 which is currently the subject of a lawsuit brought by the Facebook owned firm against the NSO Group in a federal court in California and the reporting on leaked data that was the basis of the Pegasus Project.
As per a report published on The Wire, the leak, as noted by The Wire and 16 other media organisations, consisted of thousands of numbers that the consortium believes were selected as candidates for possible surveillance by government clients of the NSO Group. This has included a wide cast of individuals from heads of state to government officials to journalists and human rights defenders. Digital forensics conducted by Amnesty International’s Security Lab on a small cross-section of the phones on the list showed traces of either an attempted Pegasus attack or a full infection.
When WhatsApp declared two years ago that users had been at risk of an attempted attack through NSO malware, it said, it had discovered that about 100 of 1,400 targets were members of civil society -journalists, human rights defenders and activists. The users were targeted through a vulnerability in the messaging app’s security that was later fixed.
“The first thing I’d say is that this reporting matches what we saw in the attack we defeated two years ago and it’s very consistent with what we were loud about then,” the WhatsApp CEO observed.
“The attack we saw was people, you know, NSO group attempting to attack people’s phones through our service. It was a very clear actual attempted attacks and in that list, in addition to journalists, human rights defenders and the others, we saw government officials, you know, in countries around the world,” he added